26 August 2018 12:39 AM

There will be blood, and smoke rising in columns over the centre of a major city, and helicopters, too, perhaps even soldiers.

A terrible tragedy is coming to at least one of our major prisons, and only a complete reversal in our crazy liberal social experiment can prevent it.

As I have been arguing fruitlessly against that liberal experiment for more than 20 years, I see little chance that it will be avoided.

Common sense has been banished from our country, but nobody connects this with its results.

The liberals themselves drivel that prisons are full because we send too many people to them. I will come to that in a moment.

Others claim that the squalor, drugs and violence of the verminous Birmingham Prison, revealed last week, are the result of privatisation.

Well, I oppose private prisons because I do not think the punishment of wrongdoers is a business. It is the moral duty of the state.

But it is not the issue here. It is easy to find state-run prisons that are just as bad as Birmingham.

The truth is astonishingly simple. In the 1960s, our ruling elite decided that they knew better than any generation before them.

Hard-bought experience was ignored, and those who had that experience were pushed out.

At the core of the elite’s policy was a threefold mistake.

They thought prevention of crime by a patrolling police force was too expensive and a waste of time, and sought to replace it with fire-brigade policing with lots of fast cars, radios, CCTV cameras and helicopters.

They thought that punishment was itself wrong. Crime was a social disease, explained by poverty or child abuse.

Prisons would no longer be charged with ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’.

This was because people were no longer considered responsible for their own actions.

Instead, in some mysterious way, never explained and never known to have happened in the history of the human race, they were to be ‘rehabilitated’.

This is one of the best examples of the iron law that the longer a word is, the less it means.

They abandoned deterrence.

This was because it meant they, our political leaders, had to take personal responsibility for harsh actions, so as to keep the people of Britain safe from harm.

They lacked the fortitude and resolve to hang perhaps a dozen heinous murderers a year, claiming that they could not risk the (rare) death of an innocent person.

As a result, they hugely increased the readiness of criminals to carry and use lethal weapons, especially knives.

Hundreds of innocent people have died or had their lives unalterably ruined as a result.

It is interesting that the same sort of politicians have often been quite happy to rain missiles down on Belgrade, Baghdad, Tripoli, Mosul and Damascus, for supposedly ‘humanitarian’ aims. Funny old world.

In the 1960s, while wise voices warned that all this was folly, nobody could say for sure that the liberal reformers, led by the arrogant Roy Jenkins, were wrong.

But more than 50 years afterwards, it is quite obvious that they were terribly mistaken.

In normal life, when an experiment fails, we learn from it.

The prototype aircraft crashes. We go back to the drawing board.

The experimental new drug makes the disease worse. We abandon it.

Only in the fantasy world of British politics and media does nobody ever learn anything from experience.

In Parliament and Whitehall, at the BBC and The Guardian, they refuse to understand that this mess is their fault.

They prefer to blame all our ills on Margaret Thatcher. Though she failed to put the crime crisis right, she didn’t cause it.

And so we continue to do the stupid things we have been doing for 50 years, somehow expecting that they will eventually work.

As Albert Einstein said, this is the classic definition of madness.

Listen: in 1961, when England and Wales still had serious punitive prisons, we retained the death penalty for heinous murder, we had a patrolling police force and a population not much smaller than it is now, there were 27,000 people in prison.

Now there are more than 80,000. But that is not a fair comparison.

If we had the laws and rules of 1961, and the crimes of today, we would probably need the entire Isle of Wight to house convicted prisoners.

Instead, thousands of people who would have been doing proper porridge in 1961 roam free, frightening you and me, and not fearing authority.

And because they don’t fear authority, nobody else does either, and the number of criminals grows far faster than we can build new jails.

In 1961, criminals were quite likely to end up in jail for a second offence, a fact which frightened many away from crime.

Now, most criminals (except homicides, and a few other very violent offenders) do not even meet authority until they have committed dozens of unrecorded, undetected crimes in areas where the police rarely bother to go.

Even when they are detected, it can take years of empty cautions, unpaid fines, laughable community punishments, and suspended sentences that are never activated, before they are actually locked up.

By the time they get to prison, they have such total contempt for authority that the safest thing to do is to leave them alone, and turn a blind eye to their use of drugs, and let them out as fast as possible. So this is what we do.

Traditional prison officers, sniffing the wind, are leaving by the score because they see where this will end.

Inexperienced recruits, hopelessly outnumbered by day and by night, can only make a pretence of being in charge.

But because it is all behind high walls or fences, the truth gets out in brief flashes of publicity.

Well, that may soon change.

But will the liberals ever admit they were wrong? Have you ever heard a liberal do that?

No, when the flames flicker and the sirens blare, it will somehow turn out to be Maggie’s fault. You wait and see.

Tories R Us – another big brand with no future

Both the Labour and Tory parties remind me of troubled high street chains such as Woolworths or Toys R Us, which once seemed to dominate all, and then, in a matter of months, turned out to be empty shells, and vanished.

They look more permanent than they are. Last year the Tories raised more money from dead people, in their wills, than from living ones, and are now being targeted by entryist fanatics.

Labour must surely be on the edge of civil war.

Both should have been replaced by serious parties long ago, but were propped up by billionaires.

Now, when they fall, what will arise in their place? I fear a British Trump.

Crucial scenes we’ve wiped from history

I am puzzled that we have done so little to mark the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (as it then was) 50 years ago.

The arrival of tanks in Prague was, and remains, one of the most poignant and shocking events of modern history, which I remember very well.

To see the iron crudity of Soviet power crushing liberty in Europe’s loveliest city was especially painful.

It was also, though we did not know it at the time, the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism – and the start of a new and far more dangerous version of Marxism, which got loose at the same time and now infects the once-free West.

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last September. This article followed the release of a gruelling new film (the fourth) about this event, ‘Anthropoid’.

Towards the end, I wrote :

‘What I can’t recall from ‘Daybreak’ and couldn’t get from ‘Anthropoid’ is any great consideration of the claim often made that Churchill thought the Czechs were a bit too quiescent and content under German occupation, and hoped to end that by killing Heydrich. In short, he is said to have been counting on a severe retaliation by Hitler. Though whether he expected what he got, or rather what the poor Czechs got, who can say? Even Churchill, a man who knew a lot of history, may not have fathomed the National Socialist capacity for wickedness. Idealists are so much more dangerous than ordinary tyrants.

We did several rather questionable things during the long years when we had no army on the European continent, and to this day it is hard to discuss them without meeting the wall of rage which I encounter if I criticise our bombing of German civilians. NOTE: Since first writing this passage, with its reference to Churchill’s alleged attitude, I’ve made some effort to back it up with historical warrant, and can’t find anything which implicates Churchill, though another name does come up, which I’ll come to. I’ve kept it in because I am still not sure of the truth, would be glad of any contributions or references which either confirm it or explode it, and because I decided it would be dishonest to cut it out, as I have long believed it and often said it. Certainly the Czechs were more lightly occupied than many other of Hitler’s subject peoples, their factories produced valuable armaments for the German Reich, and attempts to send in saboteurs by parachute often failed, ending in the denunciation of the agents or in the round-up and massacre of the resistance members who had helped them.

They Rightly Feared Reprisals

But I will say one thing for ‘Anthropoid’ (which follows ‘Daybreak’ quite closely in many aspects but not all - most modern film critics don’t seem to have seen ‘Daybreak’, or at least don’t mention it if they have). It makes it clear that those who helped Heydrich’s assassins did not, in many cases, find out till rather late what it was they were aiding – by which time, of course they were doomed to appalling fates by their participation. And it does not hide the fact that leading figures in the Czech resistance, on the spot, were horrified when they learned of the plan, opposed it and tried to get it stopped by appealing to London. (They were, in their defence, already gravely demoralised by the clever and efficient repression which Heydrich and his forerunners had visited on them. They had been penetrated and many of their best people had been arrested and murdered). This is all true and very much confirmed by the authoritative book on the subject, Professor Callum Macdonald’s 1989 work ‘The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich’ .

According to Macdonald, the man who wanted to go ahead with the operation was Eduard Benes, who seems to have spoken personally to Gabcik before he set off. With the USSR now in the war, Benes need a major stroke against the Nazis to show that the non-Communist Czech resistance was capable of potent action. If Churchill opposed or encouraged this, I don’t know, and would be grateful for any reference.’

Now, a new book by the industrious, original and diligent Lynne Olson (whose ‘Those Angry Days’, a superb and badly needed account of the USA’s reluctance to enter World War Two, is still absurdly not published here in Britain) has found some more information on this.

In her interesting new work ‘Last Hope Island’, about Britain’s continental allies in the 1939 war, recently published by Scribe, Ms Olson writes that the Czech leader, Eduard Benes, and his intelligence chief, Frantisek Moravec, knew very well that the assassination of Heydrich would result in an appalling series of German atrocities and went ahead with it nonetheless, despite the direct protests of Czech resistance leaders in Prague who begged them not to proceed.

Benes wanted to please Stalin and to enhance his status as a resistance leader, weaker than that of countries which had been violently occupied. It is embarrassing to recall this but his standing was very weak because until 1942 the Munich Agreement still stood, and so his country’s dissolution and occupation were technically accepted as legal by the British and French governments which had agreed to it. Britain did not formally repudiate the Munich agreement until 5th August 1942, nearly four years after the event. Anthony Eden announced this in the Commons, nearly two years after Winston Churchill, in a broadcast in September 1940, had declared that the Munich Agreement had been ‘destroyed’ by the Germans. Britain then recognised the Czech provisional Government in Exile on the 18th July 1941, a move which may have had something to do with the German invasion of the USSR then under way, not very far from the Czech lands.

Lynne Olsen (pages 237-244)notes that Moravec was begged to get Benes to call the mission off by the coincidentally-named Arnost Heidrich, a leading member of the Czech resistance .He warned, with complete accuracy, of ‘ferocious repression’ in reprisal for the planned Heydrich assassination, and said, also accurately, that it would wipe out the remains of any resistance organisation. Benes told Moravec to ignore the plea.

Benes apparently believed the killing would unite the Czech people and imnspire more of them to join the resistance. In fact, as Ms Olson writes, open resistance in what had been Czechoslovakia was more or less at an end in late 1942. But while success has many fathers, failure is an orphan, and tragedy even more of one. She notes that Benes (after the horrible reprisal tortures, murders, massacres and repression had happened) long afterwards denied any involvement, saying that “no order for Heydrich’s murder was ever issued from London”. But Moravec eventually admitted that Benes had known all about it . Benes later found other ways of pleasing Stalin, which might explain his supine behaviour during the Communist putsch in Prague in 1948. On the other hand, it was clear to him by then that the ‘West’ had abandoned him to the Soviet sphere, so perhaps it is unfair to criticise him too much. What about Churchill? Did he know? Well, Olson, who says mordantly that Churchill made no mention of the assassination in his history of the war, recounts that SOE (Special Operations Executive) papers released in 1994 revealed that top SOE officials had known who the target was to be.

SOE was Churchill’s child. It is, to me, inconceivable that , if SOE knew, Churchill would not have been informed, and would not have had a veto. The old theory, that he wanted this event to take place, in full knowledge of the likely consequences, seems to hold some water after all.

Yet most people vaguely believe the lemming story to be true. It's become quite an important part of their thinking and they are unwilling to let it go.

Say to them that lemmings don’t actually have a mass death-wish, and they will cry out in astonishment and disbelief. Could a similar delusion be affecting views on NATO expansion, supposedly caused by the shivering fear of tiny, furry states cowering on the edge of the Russian bear-pit, begging for our supposedly mighty protection?

Well, that is certainly what almost everyone thinks now, though the distinguished historian Professor Richard Sakwa, of the University of Kent, says in his excellent and courageous book ‘Frontline Ukraine’ that NATO’s expansion has in fact created the very fear against which it claims to be protecting its new members. Let us see.

WE won't buy your tomatoes. Fancy a nuclear umbrella instead?

The first Warsaw Pact country to join NATO was East Germany (the DDR) , which became a NATO member by being absorbed into the Federal Republic in 1990. Amusingly it had always been a de facto member of the Common Market/EU because West Germany refused to maintain a customs barrier between the two states. Three former Warsaw Pact states (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) joined NATO in 1999. See if you can find any suggestion, between 1989, when they got their freedom, and 1999, that Russia posed any threat to them, or that anyone was complaining of any such threat.

As I recall, at that time, Russia was (as it is now) economically prostrate and pitifully weak in conventional military terms, easily outnumbered in men and money by NATO as a whole. It also had no actual border with the Czech Republic. Nor did Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland (unless you count the exclave at Kaliningrad), Romania or Bulgaria.

I can recall the joke being told at the time that NATO membership was given to these states as a consolation prize, after the EU told them to wait outside. They had to wait till May 2004 to join the EU, along with Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, by which time it had almost completely abandoned any attempts to demand economic and political rigour in its new members and had become openly an instrument of American power in Europe.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO in March 2004, again as deficit countries, that is to say, they required much more in the way of commitment than they provided in the way of effective force. In the same way most of the EU’s new members demanded far more than they could possibly contribute, and in several cases could only be said to reach EU standards of legality and transparency if the EU closed both its eyes and held its nose.

Did I see the joke ‘We’ve given them our nuclear umbrella because we don’t want to buy their tomatoes’ in the ‘Economist? I haven’t the archive access to find it, but I can’t think where else I got it from. The problem with these countries was that leaving the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, and exposing themselves to the icy winds of capitalism, wasn’t actually quite as good as they had hoped it would be.

Communist education had in fact been quite good.

The old industries and their guaranteed jobs collapsed.Their former markets, for agricultural produce and manufactured goods, were also gone. But they had one huge advantage. Schooling and skill-training under Communism had been surprisingly good, often more rigorous than its western equivalent. They were sources of well-educated cheap labour (and they still are, Poland exports huge amounts of unemployment in the form of low-paid migrant workers, Germany shifted a lot of manufacture to the Czech Republic etc). Most of them would be in a terrible mess had they not latched on to various subsidy teats in the West. Poland’s EU subsidy is gigantic, for instance. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/01/eu-poland-10-years-economic

Again, I can recall, at that time, no evidence of any kind that Russia was menacing these countries or making territorial demands upon them. It couldn’t if it wanted to.

‘The picture we are building up in our minds of a revanchist Russia is as absurd as their picture of an aggressive and encircling West. Russian military expenditure is one tenth of NATO’s and their economy one twentieth.’

If Russia wanted to attack the Baltics, it had years to do so

I might add that the three Baltic Republics escaped Moscow’s control in 1991. After the stupid and failed KGB-inspired displays in Riga and Vilnius in January that year, which I witnessed, no further attempt was made to stop them. In the time between their departure and their supposedly frightened scurry under Auntie NATO’s skirts 13 years later. (Thirteen years!) , there was no attempt made by Moscow to reassert control, despite (in two of the Baltic states) some rather stupid and indefensible treatment of the Russian minorities there. Perhaps they wish they had acted. As the Baltic States’ membership of NATO now puts Western forces in Narva 85 miles from St Petersburg, about the same difference as Coventry is from London. We, who are surrounded by deep salt water, would gasp if any of our major cities (especially one which suffered a lengthy enemy siege in living memory) were within such a short distance of the forces of an increasingly hostile alliance.

Now I must once again mention Peter Conradi’s very interesting new book ‘Who Lost Russia’, which will eventually require a full posting here in its own right. Mr Conradi, a distinguished former Moscow foreign co0rrepondent, has looked into the origins of NATO expansion and what he found is devastating.

First, he notes that the great US diplomat George Kennan, the architect of the whole US Cold War policy, opposed NATO expansion as mistaken. In 1947, in dealing with the USSR, he had taken a wholly different view, begging a complacent Washington, stuffed with Soviet fellow-travellers, to grasp that Stalin was not its friend

He said: ‘the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies ... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.’

The father of the Cold War opposed NATO expansion

But that was because he grasped that post 1991 Russia was wholly different from the Soviet Union.

but here’s an example: ‘''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.(my emphasis) This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''

He added: ‘ ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”’ (My emphasis)

On 7th February 1997, the London Times, now a keen enthusiast for the ‘New Cold War’ took a very different view. It ran a leading article supporting Mr Kennan.

It said of him’ In measured terms, and with much wisdom, he used the pages of The New York Times to analyse and then denounce the course Mr Clinton had set as "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era." Mr Kennan will be 93 in nine days time. He is the last survivor of the generation which, in Dean Acheson's memorable description, was present at the creation of the superpower struggle. Three years before Madeleine Albright was born he started service at the American Embassy in Moscow. In 1946, months before President Clinton drew his first breath, he had sent his "long telegram" back to Washington warning his then still starry-eyed political masters about the real intentions and threat of Stalinist Russia...’

‘...Europe lives under the liberty he predicted then. When such a man declares so starkly that Nato expansion would destabilise Russian democracy and "restore the atmosphere of the Cold War", it should send a warning to all. When he asks why East-West relations should "become centred on the question of who would be allied with whom and by implication against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict", that demands a convincing answer.’

‘As Mr Kennan correctly notes, at some moment over the past 12 months, with no real warning, this radical redesign of Nato's role moved from general proposition to the edge of policy. It did so despite little public deliberation in this continent and virtually none at all in North America. Mr Clinton's conversion seems to have been inspired more by the desire to please voters of Polish descent in Michigan than any serious military calculation.’

They said the policy ‘risks undermining the credibility of Nato, weakening the hand of reformers in Russia, and reducing - not enhancing - the real security of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe.‘ They wouldn't say that now.

So what happened to Western policy. Why was Bill Clinton, a man unversed in and ignorant of foreign policy, persuaded to back this huge and costly u-turn opposed by the most distinguished thinker in the field?

When I was a crude materialist Bolshevik, I used to believe that arms manufacturers more or less ran the world. I was convinced that these merchants of death actually promoted conflict to sell their wares, like the fictional ‘Cator and Bliss’ in Eric Ambler’s popular front thrillers of the 1930s. When I abandoned this rather thuggish political position, I persuaded myself that this was rubbish(which it largely is). Arms manufacturers are just the same as any other business, most of the time.

Can this be the sordid truth behind the New Cold War?

But in the early 1990s, just as Communism itself collapsed, the Marxist world-view seems to have begun to become true again. Please read this :

Read it all, but here are some key segments: ‘American arms manufacturers, who stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate approves NATO expansion, have made enormous investments in lobbyists and campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington.

The end of the cold war has shrunk the arms industry and forced it to diversify.

But expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- first to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, then possibly to more than a dozen other countries -- would offer arms makers a new and hugely lucrative market.

America's six biggest military contractors have spent $51 million on lobbying in the last two years, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Campaign Study Group, a research company in Springfield, Va.

If lobbying costs were included from all companies that perform military-related activities, like computer and technology firms, they would dwarf the lobbying effort of any other industry. Not all of the lobbying has been for NATO expansion. The contractors have billions of dollars worth of other business before Congress. But NATO expansion has been a central concern because it offers so many opportunities.’

‘Under NATO rules, new members are required to upgrade their militaries and make them compatible with those of the Western military alliance, which oversees the most sophisticated -- and expensive -- weapons and communication systems in the world. The companies that win the contracts to provide that ''inter-operability'' to the aging Soviet-made systems in Eastern Europe will benefit enormously from NATO's eastward expansion.

Thus the sums spent on lobbying and for campaign contributions are relatively small compared with the potential benefits in the new markets provided by a larger NATO, particularly from the sale of big-ticket items like fighter aircraft.’

Well, I learned in my Soviet days that the madder something appeared to be (e.g. empty restaurants refusing trade because they were ‘full’, vodka served in teapots and poured into teacups), the more certain it was that it had, buried somewhere, a strong, simple material explanation. Have we here found the squalid, crude reason for the otherwise crazy revival of a dead conflict in the heart of Europe?

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15 March 2010 3:51 PM

The car I'm pictured with in the first extract from my book 'The Rage Against God' is a Tatra, a machine not generally seen in Western Europe and, as far as I know, not at all in Britain. I certainly don't own one, though there would be a certain ironic pleasure in doing so. The problem is, as often, whether anyone would get the joke. In 1978, when the photograph was taken, these mechanized giant cockroaches were a reasonably common sight in Prague, where they were used by senior Communist Party officials. I have always thought this car, with its divided rear window and frog-like front aspect, was the most sinister ever made, though perhaps this is because of the Tatra's starring role in the unjustly-forgotten film L’Aveu (The Confession), Costa-Gavras's account of the nightmare Slansky trials in Prague in 1953, worth seeing in any case, but justified alone for the ghastly moment in the trial when the tortured, starved defendant's trousers fall down in open court, and the room explodes into ugly laughter, in which state murderers and victims are all complicit. It will freeze your heart, if you can locate a copy.

That's perhaps the easiest question to answer of all those raised by correspondents (who, I hope, by the way, have also been aware of my brother's rather different memoirs, which are not published till June but have been serialised coincidentally by The Sunday Times during the past three weeks).

Wesley Crosland is I think mistaken when he says that there is no rational basis for Christian faith. On the contrary, as reason and faith are wholly connected and Christian theology is wedded to reason. In fact, some would argue that it is the first and most thorough attempt to understand the universe and its nature through reason. What he may perhaps mean is that faith cannot be based upon knowledge. That is quite true. St Paul memorably and beautifully described faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ And in what is possibly the most powerful passage he ever wrote, he admitted that we now see as through a glass, darkly. If Mr Crosland would actually see what the dispute is, he would get more out of it. There is no point in damning Christians for making claims they don't make, or misrepresenting all Christians as fanatical literalists, any more than there is any point in crediting science with knowledge it does not in fact possess. Both Theistic and Atheistic positions have the power to explain the universe in ways which have major consequences for the way in which we behave towards each other. Neither has the power to prove that its explanation is correct. The argument must therefore be about why one or other explanation is preferable, not about who is right and who is wrong. My interest is in the origins of the Rage Against God, and the reason for that rage, which is what the book is about.

As for the problems which some readers have had in obtaining the book through an internet seller, I hope very much that these have now been resolved. Though it is of course also available through the Mail on Sunday's Review Bookstore, where they will not meet these difficulties. I should also add that the publication date, mistakenly given as 1st May, was in fact today (15th March), and proper bookshops should be able to obtain it with ease. If anyone has any trouble, please describe it here and I will do what I can to put it right. Readers in the USA should know that the book is to be published there on 1st May, by Zondervan.

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01 October 2009 1:57 PM

This title will always be disputed. But I think Pieter Bruegel's 'Tower of Babel' must be one of the candidates for the crown. I had only ever seen reproductions until last week, when I finally managed to look at the original, which is rather surprisingly in Vienna (though I believe there is another version in Rotterdam). From the very first time I saw it, perhaps 45 years ago, I have been haunted by this picture without properly knowing why.

First of all it is an extremely beautiful composition, a vast and satisfying landscape, dominated by the tremendous, dream-like, never-to-be-finished tower and crammed with tiny detail which is actually quite hard to see when you get close to the original, for over-sensitive alarms shriek if you step too near to the canvas. The room in which it is displayed is almost never quiet, because so many visitors, overcome with the desire to look closely at it, unintentionally set off the electronic squawk. A tactful human guard would be a better idea, I think. Or free opera glasses on loan, so that you could study the detail from a safe distance.

Next it is full of imagination. Bruegel, in the 16th century, has conjured out of his own mind the size and shape and possible design of a tower about which the Bible says almost nothing. It is quite unlike what we should think of today, in the age of reinforced concrete and skyscrapers. It is also quite believable, rising out of a seaport city of Bruegel's time, (he began life with an 'h' in his name, but later dropped it, so I shall do the same) enormous but otherwise completely in tune with its architecture.

It is, finally, grimly satirical. Look in the foreground and you can see the richly-dressed King Nimrod, attended by his flatterers, courtiers and civil servants, while the stone-masons fall to the ground and grovel before him. Yet we know that at any minute the curse will fall, everyone will be gabbling gibberish at everyone else as great blocks of stone fall from the wildly-swinging cranes. The tower will fail and so begin at that instant to crumble, the lovely city at its foot will presumably become first chaotic, then bankrupt and finally a desolate ruin, where the wind shall blow over it, and the place of it shall know it no more.

Why does this story persist, and continue to enchant and perplex us? How can a few vague verses in the book of Genesis have given rise to this potent, thoughtful and instantly understandable masterpiece about human vanity?

Some of my correspondents will no doubt write in to tell me that the Genesis story is literal truth. That is their view and they are entitled to it. We were not there, and nor were they, and my experience is that people believe what it suits them to believe. My own view is that it is much more powerful as a parable of human arrogance, and that this is why it lasts, and why it makes such a powerful painting, drawing people to see it from all over the civilised world. It is, in short, that rare thing, a faithful rendering of an absolute and eternal truth.

The more we seek to be as gods, the more we end up failing and instead becoming the lowest savages. In some ways, the higher our aims, the lower we sink - language, of course, being the thing which most clearly separates us from the beasts. The Soviet experiment, with its limitless slaughter, was conceived by men who believed they could begin the world over again and make it better. No doubt Einstein and his friends had noble intentions when they urged Franklin Roosevelt to exploit nuclear fission for warlike purposes. Yet it ended with the mass-killing by heat, blast and radiation of thousands of civilians. And let us hope that really is the end of it.

The same goes for most of the great projects to remake the world in a Godlike fashion - empires, civilising missions, the Iraq war, and now the indefensible Afghan war as well.

What has all this to do with the Labour conference, or Gordon Brown? Very little, directly, I suppose, except that the whole time I was in Brighton I would have preferred to sit and talk about this overpowering picture, and the others that I saw, than to do what I actually did and discuss politics, an increasingly narrow and self-obsessed subject composed of nine parts gossip to one part philosophy, and that on good days.

This is partly because I am now close to completing the book about the Rage Against God which has been eating my every spare moment for months, and such thrilling affirmations of faith and understanding are encouraging as I rip up or eviscerate early drafts, or falter at the last chapter. Flemish painting, whether it is the stillness and serenity of Van Eyck or the direct, ferocious realism of Bruegel, speaks more directly to me than the lovely but often rather distant and stiff religious art of the Italians. Who but a Flemish artist could have painted the scourging of Christ as a 16th century scene, with one of the jailers actually aiming his foot at Jesus's groin, while his comrades mock and punch Our Lord and another, smirking, prepares the crown of thorns? Perhaps the violent and cruel history of this part of the world made suffering easier to understand.

Indirectly, the person who is interested in such things seems to me to be better qualified to have ideas about the future of the country than the person who is not interested in painting, or music, or architecture. Politicians of the recent past, such as Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Enoch Powell and no doubt several others in all parties whose interest existed though we never learned about it, read great books, knew history, cared about painting and architecture, travelled in their own country and in others. You may say that this didn't do us much good. I'd say that they'd have been much worse without the hinterland. Many had also experienced war, though as Nevil Shute argued in his recently-reissued, rather touching and (as always) enjoyable novel 'Requiem for a Wren', it may be that the wartime generation often enjoyed wartime too much, and in some cases even secretly hoped for another war in the hope of recapturing the exhilaration of comradeship and shared adversity which are extraordinarily pleasurable.

The war also comes to mind as you travel (as I did) by train down from Berlin to Vienna, passing through rebuilt Dresden, now sparkling with renewal, and stopping on the way in Prague. Just as was the case 150 years ago, you never really cease to be in German-dominated territory. But you must still use a different currency in Prague, though change left over from Berlin is once again useful in Vienna.

I am taken to task for allegedly falling back into default position over Neville Chamberlain's betrayal of the Czechs. Not really. There isn't any question that Chamberlain did betray Czechoslovakia. The revisionist view of the war doesn't dispute that. It questions whether Chamberlain, or Britain, should have been involved in this episode in the first place. Chamberlain's loss of reputation came from two things - his pretence of being Prague's friend and ally, when he had no power to help that country, and his childlike belief in Hitler's word. Sitting by and doing nothing (except quietly building up our defences) would have been both more honest and more effective, and wouldn't have made a ha'porth of difference to the fate of the Czechs.

In Berlin I also revisited the Soviet war memorial at Treptow, in a large and enjoyably melancholy park in the far East of the city. It is a powerful work of art in its own right, not least because it lies on top of a mass grave of Soviet soldiers who died in the taking of the city, and I suspect that people don't like being moved by it and so dismiss it as 'kitsch'. Well, I am always moved by sacrifice and loss in war, however awful the leaders were who caused it. Real men, advancing into real bullets, seem to me to deserve a moment of remembrance whoever they were, though I wouldn't myself lay a wreath (as Ronald Reagan did) at a Nazi war cemetery. There's a choking moment in Gore Vidal's fictional 'Lincoln' where the President, by then very tired and burdened by the deaths for which he is responsible, visits some Confederate prisoners of war and acknowledges their courage in their own, wrong but romantic cause. I am sure this is true. I have never had any doubt that the Gettysburg Address honours the valour of both sides in that battle, as anyone must who knows what happened (and Michael Shaara's historical novel 'The Killer Angels' is a fine description). The Treptow monument, unusually, shows atrocities against civilians in some of its relief sculptures, and also displays several long quotes from Stalin himself, which must have caused the Soviet and East German authorities problems in the years after he was denounced.

In Prague, by comparison, a huge empty plinth stands over the city where once there was a giant statue of Stalin. This was actually blown up by the Communist authorities (it took several goes, spread over several days, and photographs exist of the explosions gradually reducing the thing to dust) after Khrushchev's secret speech ended the Stalin cult.

Prague also boasts what is as far as I know the only Museum of Communism, a small but rather good and witty collection of mementoes of that ghastly era, including sagging shelves of unattractive consumer goods and a school classroom crammed with class-war propaganda. There is also film, some of it heartbreaking, of Czechs standing up to authority in the streets of Prague. Anyone who thinks the Czechs are somehow soft and pliable, or who has forgotten that Communism deployed brutal muscle to guard itself from the people, would benefit by seeing this. Anyone who goes to Prague and doesn't see the Museum (which cheekily advertises itself as being between the Casino and the McDonalds) will not even begin to understand why this city is worth visiting in the first place.

Next week I hope to send a rather more political despatch from within Fortress Cameron in Manchester, where I plan to harangue a meeting hosted by the Bruges Group on Monday afternoon. This is within the security cordon, so those without passes will not be able to attend.

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03 September 2009 3:36 PM

Once again I'm criticised in another, left-wing, blog. Michael White of the Guardian (Google Michael White, Guardian and 'honourable road to ruin'). And, oddly, Mr White makes the same mistaken criticism of my alternative history as did several people who posted comments on the article or here. He seems to think I am advocating a peace with Hitler *after* Dunkirk. Anything but. By then we had to fight, as any terms would have been intolerable. I am saying we should not have entered the war in the first place.

He says what fun it used to be having a good row with the Tory MP and mischief-maker Alan Clark, adding :’It is less fun having one with Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, whose version of this thesis (“If we hadn't fought, would we still have a British Empire?”) was published at the weekend. It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez...The list goes on, and it is foolish. If we had done a deal with Hitler from a position of weakness he would have come back for more. Had he gone east to finish the Russians first, who knows what might have happened, but he could not have held on to his conquests for long. Empires rarely do and, Hitler or no, the curtain was already falling on ours.’

Well, I've no idea what would have happened if we'd let Hitler fight Stalin, though I find it hard to believe it would have been any worse than the hell that actually did take place. But what I principally remember about Alan Clark was taking him to lunch, and being told by his secretary that he was a vegetarian. After scouring London in vain for a suitably grand vegetarian venue, I rang her up and explained the problem. ‘Oh’, she said, naming a stately Covent Garden eatery famous for its game, ‘Rules will be fine. When he says “vegetarian” he means he won't eat anything that's been killed in a slaughterhouse. He doesn't mind if it's been shot in the open air’. When I teased him about this over his well-shot pheasant (I think), he muttered something about how Hitler, too, couldn't abide slaughterhouse meat. He loved to do this sort of thing. He told someone else I know that he was a bit of a 'national socialist', just to shock. Of course, he was nothing of the kind. Silly stuff, in the end. He was a reasonably entertaining diarist, but not much of a politician.

But back to Mr White, whose glum and increasingly policemanly demeanour has obviously prevented me from realising that he is, in fact, in search of fun. Mr White, whom I meet from time to time in radio and TV studios for adversarial conflict, always looks as if he wants to arrest me for showing insufficient respect for David Cameron, the Guardian's new best mate. Nor is he terrifically forthcoming with the jokes.

I was not in any way suggesting that we 'did a deal' with Hitler. In fact, I was suggesting that we avoided putting ourselves into a position where we very nearly had to. Declaring war, inadequately armed and prepared, in 1939 meant that we had either to win the war, or do a deal. Few could then have guessed the third possibility, of handing over conduct of the war to Roosevelt and Stalin, while going slowly bankrupt.

Had Hitler wanted to force us into a deal after Dunkirk (which I don't believe he did), he could have massed his forces in France rather than on the Soviet border in the spring of 1941, and launched an invasion of this country. I think, given our state at the time, that we would have been at least in serious danger of being overwhelmed. Nothing in Hitler's behaviour in June 1940, after we had been driven off the continent, suggests that he was particularly interested in doing any such thing. We were left in a sort of belligerent limbo in 1940, from which we were eventually rescued by the USSR and the USA, who then conducted the war according to their goals.

Let me make this point again. There is no evidence, in word or deed, that Hitler had any special interest in the British Empire, or in destroying it. Sad as it is to acknowledge it, Britain did not figure greatly in his calculations or seem to be much of an obstacle to his plans. If we had 'given' him Poland (which we actually had no power either to give or withhold) as we had 'given' him the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia (which we also had no power to give or withhold) what was the 'more' he would have come back for? Would our willingness to let him seize chunks of Central Europe, where we had no interest or possessions, have somehow fuelled a German desire for Burma, Malaya or Nyasaland? Hitler wanted a German Land Empire stretching into the east, into Ukraine for the wheat, and the Caucasus for the oil - probably something like the territory seized by the Kaiser at the 1917 Brest-Litovsk Treaty. I don't follow the logic that leaving Hitler to fight his twin, Stalin, would have fuelled in him a desire to seize Delhi or Nairobi. The threat to the British Empire came from the USA, which wanted it broken up, and from Japan, which wanted to steal large chunks of it. Though Japan was powerless as long as we and France were militarily strong in the Far East.

It is perfectly true that an Anglo-French stand against Hitler when he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 might have brought him down. But this is much more fantastical than my essay. By 1936, we had already trashed our good relations with Italy and nobody in democratic Europe, nobody - not even Churchill - actually favoured the military action which would have thrown the then-tiny German army back over the Rhine bridges.

After that, you have to ask, what exactly would Britain have done had we 'fought' over the takeover of Austria in 1937, another genuine turning point. With what army? With what air force? Come to that, how would we have saved Czechoslovakia?

Look at a map. Central Europe is more interesting and complex than you think. Prague is not some remote Slavic outpost, but a long way west of Vienna. In September 1938, Prague was perhaps an hour's flight from the Luftwaffe airfields near Dresden. Bratislava, then the second city of Czechoslovakia, is practically in the suburbs of Vienna, where Hitler was free to station enormous forces. The territory of Hitler's Reich embraced the Czech lands from North, and Southern flanks. However gallantly the Czechs might have fought in their mini-Maginot line in the Sudetenland, what would have become of them, while we gallantly dropped propaganda leaflets on Mannheim and Stuttgart from our bi-planes, and the French polished their belt-buckles in the Maginot Line, as they did while Poland perished in September 1939? They'd have gone the way of the Poles. We didn't fight in 1937, 1938 and 1939 because we couldn't. The silly part of Munich was not our realistic failure to stand up for people we couldn't actually help except with words, but our misleading and dishonourable pretence that we could help the Czechs, the pretence that we were their 'friends' at Munich and the pretence that the inevitable climbdown was 'Peace with Honour’.

It was this deluded, idealistic piffle that was exposed when Hitler grabbed Prague in March 1939, and we then gave our inexplicable - and wholly worthless - guarantee to Poland. What good did it do? It took away from us any freedom to decide when or whether to go to war. It didn't save an ounce of Polish sovereignty, or a square inch of Polish territory, let alone a single life or building. Having been useless and idealistic over Prague, we were then to be useless and militant over Warsaw. It has been said many times how much worse it was to be a 'saved' Pole than it was to be a 'betrayed' Czech. Who can deny it?

No, the question is not what sort of a deal we'd have had to make with Hitler. My reading of 1940 tells me how very, very close we came to making such a deal after Dunkirk left us bankrupt and without an army, a state we were in entirely thanks to the beliefs that 'something must be done to stop Hitler' and 'you have to stand up to bullies', neither backed by any considered thought. Well, if you do stand up to a bully, experience suggests that you knock him down with the first blow, or he'll still be a bully. You certainly don't let him knock you down.

My reading of 1945 tells me that we ended up making a shameful deal with Stalin, under pressure from Roosevelt to do so, giving the Soviet tyrant the very 'free hand' in central Europe that we had impotently sought to deny Hitler. The difference was that by then we had sacrificed huge numbers of lives, all our wealth and our Empire. For what? If we had stayed out of power struggles in which we had no power, there'd have been no need to make a deal with Hitler, or Stalin either.

The USA, which stayed out of the conflict until December 1941, acted much as Britain used to behave in European conflicts, supplying and paying others to fight on its behalf until it had to intervene directly. This sensible policy, which made us rich and powerful in the 18th Century, did the same for the USA in the 20th.

In his jocular mockery, Mr White derides me for listing some of the things we would have escaped if we had stayed out in 1939. ‘It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez.’ Well, let Mr White tell us, which of these avoidable developments does he think were good things?

It was the people who wanted war in 1939 who exposed us to the terrible danger of having to make a deal with Hitler as a beaten nation. Had we stayed out, why would we have had to negotiate with him at all? He simply wasn't interested in us until we declared war on him.